


Hardships Unnumbered

by aspiringwriterofamazingstories



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Drama, F/M, Fairies, Fantasy, Goblins, Magic, Romance, Urban Fantasy, fairy tale, magical stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-09 12:08:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11668827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aspiringwriterofamazingstories/pseuds/aspiringwriterofamazingstories
Summary: When Y/N performs a random act of kindness for the Goblin King, she gets more than what she bargained for in return.After dealing with the heartbreak of Sarah's rejection for so long, Jareth believes he can now move on with Y/N as his new queen. Unfortunately, Jareth's ways of wooing her are far from traditional.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is a reader insert fanfic. Although this prologue is told through both perspectives, the following chapters will be seen through the reader's.
> 
> Also, I have chosen to base the reader's look off of the lovely Ashley Moore. She has a cute pixie-like face that I thought was fitting for the story.

**Prologue:**

****

 

The owl’s wings are a mix of light orange, browns, and black trim along the edges of the feathers. The tiny white spots make it look like he holds the universe on his wings. His face is round and snow cap white with large round eyes. He’s truly the most beautiful creature the young woman has ever seen, and the poor thing is in trouble.

***

He’s not an owl. He is much more. He is a king. A spoiled, bratty, self-centered king, but still a king nonetheless. A king that had once loved. A king still suffering from a broken heart. Who chose to travel in the shape of an owl when visiting the world of the humans. There was no reason to come here aside from getting away from his responsibilities, and now it looked like he would die a most embarrassing death, caught and tangled in a mess of some sort of thin, stringy wire, and a small tree...but now, here she is. A lovely young woman with light brown skin, long and thick curly hair, and a face as soft as a pixie’s. Traveling through the woods and coming across him by chance. She stops in her tracks, stunned to see him, before approaching him slowly and cautiously kneeling before him to reach out to him.

***

For a moment, he looks just a surprised to see her. He doesn’t move as she carefully approaches him. It is only when she reaches out to him that his beautiful wings beat rapidly and defensively. At first, she assumes it’s fear, but upon looking into his eyes, she could feel the pride he holds inside of him. He does not want her help.

“I only want to look,” she says softly. She shows no fear as she reaches out again, and the beating of wings slowly comes to a stop. He allows her to touch the wing tangled in what looks like fishing wire. “I’m so sorry,” she says. She hates it that people can’t enjoy the woods without leaving things as they were. She turns her attention to her bag and digs around for something, anything, that could help the owl. Pushing a book aside and moving a bag of trail mix and a water bottle out of the way, she finds at the bottom a tiny nail clipper. “This should work,” she says pulling it out before using it to clip the wire, freeing him from the tree, but not the wire itself.

“It looks like the easy part is done,” she says to the owl, “but I still need to untangle you. I just hope you trust me enough to let me.”

The owl doesn’t move, but turns his head away from her, as if ashamed.

***

She works slowly untangling the line and clipping when necessary. Her hands are soft and she’s working carefully to make sure not to hurt him. Although he refuses to look at her, he feels a familiar warmth inside of him. A warmth he hadn’t felt since the last time he fell in love with a human. He was still haunted by the last’s rejection, but he had accepted that she would never be his. Now, there was this lovely human. Treating him kindly when it could have been so easy to walk past him without ever thinking of him again. He already has in mind how he’s going to repay her. He would give her the gift he figured any young woman would want, but not yet. Not now. She’d soon free him completely of the wire, but it was far too soon to appear to her in his true form. It wouldn’t be wise to frighten her. He’s still self-centered, but he learned a thing or two from the last time he fell in love. He would try doing this in a different way this time.

***

She feels a strong sense of accomplishment fill her heart as she finally completely frees him from the wire. She takes a few moments to smooth out his feathers before removing her hands. “There we go,” she says, “We’re all done.”

She watches as the bird turns his head and meets her gaze, and for the first time during her interaction with him, she gets a strange sense that he is not a normal owl. It’s a thought she forces away immediately. Of course it’s a normal owl? What other kind of owl can it be?

She worries for a moment as it just stands there at her knees gazing up at her that perhaps he’s too hurt to fly. Before she can wonder if she should gather him up in her arms and take him to a vet, he flaps his wings before disappearing into the green of the tall evergreen trees above her. Her heart fills with pride, knowing she did a good thing today. She stands and looks up at the direction the owl disappeared and takes in a long sigh of satisfaction before deciding to head back in the direction she came before is starts to get dark, but as she begins walking that way, a shiver travels up her spine. She swears she heard a very regal sounding “thank you,” but when she turns around, there’s no one there.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Y/N's good mood is killed by the harsh and hurtful words of her aunt. She later has a dream involving a visit from a handsome and otherworldly stranger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: There is some language in this chapter that might be triggering for some readers who have experienced verbal and/or emotional abuse. Proceed with caution!

“Guess who did something amazing today?” Y/N said as she walked through the front door. It was an attempt to lighten the mood, as she could already feel the tension entering the house. Aunt Maybelle was very strict with curfews and Y/N was just over an hour late. She proceeded with caution towards the living room where she found Maybelle sitting comfortably in a chair in front of the television with her legs propped up, though she didn’t pay much attention to the current events playing on screen, as she was more focused on scrolling through the celebrity gossip on her phone.

“May?” Y/N said again realizing that she didn’t even seem to notice she had walked in. She felt a bit of relief and a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, she would be able to avoid a lecture from Maybelle about how it didn’t matter that she was an adult, she still lived under her roof, therefore, she still went by her rules. Y/N hated those lectures, moreso when Maybelle went the extra mile and nagged her about her supposed lack of appreciation for all she’s done for her over the years.

Upon hearing her name, Maybelle looked up from her phone to meet her gaze before setting the phone face down on the arm of her chair as if there was some secret on the screen she didn’t want her to see. Maybelle was nearly fifty years old, but there was still youth in her emerald eyes. Her hair was a pretty shade of blush red, but there were small signs of her age in the way it was starting to dry out and gray. Still, she was a very beautiful woman. The very type of woman who others hoped to age as graceful. “When did you get back?” she asked.

Y/N felt her heart leap. She couldn’t tell her she just walked in. Maybelle would look at the time and start her lecture if she did, but she couldn’t lie either. That was an unforgivable offense to Maybelle, even if the lie was very small. It was all the same to her. Lying about stealing a cookie from the kitchen was on the same level as lying about borrowing the car. Y/N decided it was best to change the subject.

“I saw an owl today,” she said wearing her best innocent smile.

“Excuse me?” Maybelle said. Y/N could feel her voice starting to firm.

“It was in the woods by the park,” Y/N went on, “He was tangled up in fishing wire in a tree, but I saved him! It was amazing! He let me get close enough to help and he was able to fly away.”

As soon as Y/N was finished with her story, she knew almost immediately it was a bad idea. Maybelle’s thin lips curled downwards in a frown she had come to know as the “upside down happy face” in her mental notes. It was truly a terrible look, as all of the beauty in Maybelle’s face was lost almost instantly and she turned into a crone. Even when Y/N was a kid and Maybelle was still in her prime years of youth, the “upside down happy face” made her looked like a terrible wicked witch from fairy stories meant to scare children.

“Y/N, you’re going to be graduating soon,” she said, “Here I thought that maybe you were late because you were trying find a way to do something with your life, and it turns out you’re in the park dilly-dallying like a child with filthy animals!”

The volume of her voice rose with each word spoken, and Y/N began to feel herself shrink as she stood from her chair. “Every time I think you just might have grown up, you pull this kind of thing,” she said, “You’re in your twenties, Y/N! What are you going to do when you’re done with school? Hell, what can you do with a degree in Creative Writing? You think you’re just going to be able to live your life writing those stupid fairy tales? For Christ’s sake, Y/N! What’s wrong with you?!”

Even at the age of twenty-two, Y/N wondered if Maybelle had some sort of magical powers to take away any of the good energy she held throughout the day. It didn’t matter the situation, Maybelle was always able to take away her good mood. Even when she did something Maybelle approved of, Maybelle would kill the mood by acting indifferent. Now, Y/N felt none of the satisfaction she got from rescuing the owl earlier. Only shame.

“I took you in when I didn’t have to,” Maybelle said, and as soon as she spoke these words, Y/N knew she was in for the lecture she was trying to avoid. “I gave you the life your parents never could. I spent years trying to raise you into a decent human being, and you’ve repaid me so far by being useless, picking a dumb major, and doing silly things like goofing off in the park when you ought to be doing something constructive.”

“I’m sorry,” Y/N said softly, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough. Maybelle was going to keep going. “This is why you don’t have any friends,” she said, “This is why you don’t date. Everyone else your age is socializing and making connections. You spend your time outside of school reading those childish books and drawing those creepy pictures. This is getting to be too much, Y/N. And your hair…I wish you’d straighten it out. I wish you’d put more care into your appearance. I can only imagine what everyone in the neighborhood must think of me to allow my niece to walk out of the house looking the way you do….”

The lecture went on and on, and nothing was off limits from the way she dressed, to her interests, to her future, and overall just how embarrassed Maybelle was by her. No matter what Y/N did wrong, it somehow always turned around to being about Maybelle and how the things she did and the things she liked were personal insults to her.

***

Y/N didn’t eat that night. Receiving berating lecture from her aunt was always a surefire way to kill her appetite. Instead, she changed into an old unicorn shirt long enough to work as a nightgown and went straight to bed, not because she was particularly tired, but because in times like this, she felt most comfortable pulling the covers over her head and pretending to fade away into the darkness.

The worst part about Maybelle’s verbal lashings was that part of Y/N felt that they were a little bit true. She was twenty-two years old, and all of the friends she had from high school seemed to have moved on to bigger and better things. They all went out of town to college and picked better majors. Y/N knew there were better majors to pick. She could have picked something that the job market was a little friendlier towards, but she knew her heart would not have been in it. Now, however, she was starting to wonder if following her heart was a dumb idea. Despite how much she loved her aunt, she wasn’t quite sure how long she’d be able to continue living with her. Every day there was something knew she disapproved of, and Y/N was getting tired of everything she loved getting trashed by her. She needed a change, but how was she going to attain change when all the gateways to such were blocked by a wall of “5+ years of experience?”

Holding back tears of frustration and feeling like a total failure, Y/N closed her eyes and eventually found sleep.

***

In the dream, there is a handsome stranger standing over her bed. His features are sharp, his hair platinum, and he’s almost glowing. There’s no other way to describe him other than glorious.

Who is he? How did he get in her room? Above all else, why isn’t she terrified? Her heart is racing, but not from fear.

His smirk is one of a man who knows just how amazing he is, and of a man that knows that the person looking at him knows how amazing he is as well, but there is a softness in his eyes. He looks at her as if she is worthy. As if she is more wonderful than she thinks she is. His look makes her forget the cold, cruel words of her aunt from hours before. The only thing that matters is this strange, yet comforting feeling she gets from the way this handsome man looks at her.

And then….he’s leaning down and planting a kiss on her forehead.

She feels like she could fly…as if all of her problems are solved by receiving that kiss. As if he cured all of her despair. Everything okay now….but now, something strange has happened. The man has transformed into the owl she saved. How is this happening? He flies out of her open window and it closes behind him in a slam.

***

The noise startled her awake from her dream, causing her to immediately pull the covers from over her head and check her surroundings.

With her heart still racing, she got up from her bed and approached her window to investigate. It was closed, and she had recalled it had been before she went to bed. When she was a kid, she used to keep it open with hopes Peter Pan would pay her a visit. Maybelle usually came in later to close it, but later would tell her not to keep it open at all anymore because of the bugs she was letting in.

Y/N opened the window to take a quick look outside. There was nothing strange or out of the ordinary, and turning to look around her room, nothing looked out of place. Nothing indicating anyone might have broken in.

A soft mischievous giggle could be heard from outside. Y/N almost felt it sounded like that of a child, but there was something inhuman about it. She took another look outside, leaning over the sill. There was nothing but the rustling green trees. Deciding it was nothing, she closed the window and tried to forget the whole thing as she snuggled back into her bed, dreading the coming day that was sure to be full of more disappointment.


End file.
